IRIDS Virtual Science Talks

Prof. Dr. Ayse Deniz Gökengin is an academic staff member in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine at Ege University in Turkey. She was named professor in 2003, and has been acting as the director of the Ege University HIV/AIDS Research and Practice Center since 2009. She has been providing healthcare for HIV patients since 1996 and is one of the leading clinicians in Turkey on HIV/AIDS management.

Deniz Gökengin is the founding member and general secretary of the AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections Society, a board member of the International Union for Sexually Transmitted Infections in Europe, representing Turkey and a member of the Euroguidelines in Central and Eastern Europe (ECEE) Network Group. Her major areas of interest are sexual behavior, social aspects of HIV/AIDS and the medical management of HIV/AIDS.

Dr. Benjamin La Brot is the Global Medical Affairs Lead for Infection & Immunity for Roche Molecular Systems, working on HIV and Hepatitis with a focus in LMICs.  Dr. LaBrot attended the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland and worked as a hospitalist in Ireland before founding the Floating Doctors medical organization in 2009 to deliver medical care and sustainable capacity-building to remote, underserved communities accessible by water. Dr. LaBrot is also the founder of RemoteCare Education, an advisory board member for the Faculty of Remote and Rural Healthcare at the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, and Executive Board Member for the Global Coalition for Hepatitis Elimination and a professor of Global Medicine teaching malaria, palliative care in resource-limited settings, and the nuts and bolts of humanitarian aid medical practice at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. 

Dr. Federico García, Ph.D., has worked for the past 10 years in the Microbiology Department of the University Hospital San Cecilio, Granada, Spain, where he serves, since October 2009, as Head of Department. He has served as an Associate Professor in Microbiology for the University of Granada. He is the former Vice President of the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases & Clinical Microbiology Dr. Garcia is on hospital and medical school committees, and national and European committees related to HIV resistance. He coordinates the Spanish HIV Research Network Work Package on subtypes and resistance and contributes with several European organizations on HIV resistance (ESAR, Eurocord-CHAIN) and hepatitis resistance (HEPVIR). He has been actively involved in recent research on Transmitted Drug Resistance in Spain and Europe, on genotypic investigation on HIV viral Tropism, and on clinical significance of HIV low and very low-level viraemia. He is now actively involved in hepatitis C virus and hepatitis B virus research activities. He is a past president of GEHEP (Spanish Viral Hepatitis Study Group of the Clinical Microbiology & Infectious diseases Spanish Society), and the coordinator of HEPCRESP, the Spanish national cohort on HCV resistance to new DAAs. He is the former Vice President of the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases & Clinical Microbiology. He is a former member of the Forum for HCV Collaborative Research, and the International Collaborative HCV Resistance database. Dr. Garcia received his Ph.D. from the University of Granada and is a member of professional and scientific societies, including the European Society for Antiviral Resistance, the Spanish Group for AIDS study, and the Spanish Group for Hepatitis Study.  He is reviewer of HIV & HCV papers for national and international journals.

 Dr. Ralf Bollhagen is a senior scientist working at Roche Diagnostics GmbH for the past 30 years. He has record track of patents filed, including a pretreatment method for rapid detection of HCV core antigen, and inventions related to a soluble rubella E1 antigen and variants of this peptide, and publications on the field of Rubella and hepatitis C.

Dr. Marianne Leruez-Ville is a MD specialized in Clinical Virology and holds a PHD in Virology. She is Assistant Professor and the head of the Virology laboratory of Necker-Hospital for sick children in Paris, France. She is currently the director of the congenital CMV laboratory within the French National Reference Center for Herpes Viruses. Dr. Leruez-Ville belongs to a research group focusing on fetal abnormalities and their treatment (EA 7328, Imagine Institute, University of Paris), and a founding member of the European Congenital CMV Initiative (ECCI) – a European group founded to devise and implement concrete actions to deal with the problems linked to congenital CMV infection. Her main research interest is clinical virology in relation to congenital CMV infection.

 Tiziana Lazzarotto is Full Professor of Microbiology and Clinical Microbiology, at the Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, School of Medicine at the University of Bologna in Italy. In addition, Tiziana is Head of the Operative Unit of Clinical Microbiology at IRCCS St. Orsola Polyclinic, Bologna and Director of the Post-graduate school in Microbiology and Virology, School of Medicine at the University of Bologna. Tiziana has made significant contributions in the study of viral infections, specifically on the pre and postnatal diagnosis of congenital CMV and Rubella infections and the management of CMV and EBV infections in solid organ and hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients. Professor Lazzarotto is a member of the managing committee for the Italian Society for Clinical Microbiology (AMCLI) and a founding member of the European Congenital CMV Initiative (ECCI).

Qian Feng, Ph.D, is a virologist and immunologist with a broad experience as a Research Scientist in the fields of molecular virology, cell biology and immunometabolism. Qian has studied Biomedical Research at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands. She trained on poliovirus replication at NIAID, NIH in Bethesda and on hepatitis C virus host-tissue tropism at the Rockefeller University in New York, before obtaining her PhD degree on immune activation and evasion by picornaviruses at the University Utrecht. Before joining Roche, Qian worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the ETH Zurich, where she focused on mitochondrial biology, cellular metabolism, and their regulatory role in T cell differentiation and function. She is now Clinical Scientist Infectious Diseases in the Medical and Scientific Affairs team of Roche Diagnostics International.

Nina Germič, PhD, is an Assoc. Global Medical Affairs Manager in the Infectious Diseases team. She joined Roche Diagnostics International in 2021 as an Intern in Medical Affairs Critical Care. Nina obtained her PhD degree in immunology and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Pharmacology, University of Bern, where she investigated the cellular functions of eosinophils, the autophagy process, and its implications for cancer and bacterial infections. As a visiting scientist, she was researching the innate immune response after influenza vaccination at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Bellinzona. She holds a Master of Pharmacy from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia